“If we had set it up in 2019, when this virus hit the US, we would have had access to data that enabled us to see it spread in New York, for example, without doing anything else,” said Dr. Said Mina.
Although the Observatory would not be able to identify the new coronavirus, it would have revealed an extremely large number of infections from the family of the coronavirus, which includes the common cold. It may also have shown that the new coronavirus interacted with patients’ immune systems in unexpected ways, leading to noticeable blood marks. It would have been a sign to start genetic sequencing of patient samples, identify the culprit, and would possibly have given reason to close the city earlier, Dr. Mina said. (Similarly, serology would not be able to detect the emergence of a new virus variant, such as the contagious coronavirus variants discovered in South Africa and England before spreading elsewhere. Researchers must rely on standard genomic sequences of virus test samples.)
A powerful investment
The observatory requires agreements with hospitals, blood banks and other blood sources, as well as a system for obtaining consent from patients and donors. Alex Greninger, a virologist at the University of Washington, also deals with the funding problem. Health insurance companies are unlikely to take the bill, as doctors usually do not use serological tests to treat people.
Dr Mina estimates that the observatory would cost about $ 100 million to get off the ground. He pointed out that according to his calculations, the federal government had allocated more than twice as much to the diagnostics company Ellume to set up fast enough Covid tests to cover US demand for a few days. A pathogen observatory is, according to him, a weather forecasting system that uses large numbers of buoys and sensors around the world, and passively reports on events where and when they occur. These systems are funded by government grants and are much appreciated.
The predictive power of serology is worth investing in, said Jessica Metcalf, an Princeton epidemiologist and one of the members of the Observatory. A few years ago, she and her co-workers found out in a smaller survey that the immunity to measles was ominously low in Madagascar. In 2018, an outbreak took hold and killed more than 10,000 children.
Now the half a million plasma samples in dr. Mina’s freezers, collected last year by plasma donation company Octopharma from sites across the country, are undergoing serological tests focused on the new coronavirus, funded by a $ 2 million grant from Open Philanthropy. . Tests had to wait until the researchers would set up a new robot testing facility and process the samples, but now they are working through their first groups.